In an organization having workers, a task can often be assigned to any worker who is available to do the work. For example, in a law office having attorneys, legal work can be assigned to any attorney who is not already busy or low on work. Many organizations have managers who manually assign the tasks to the workers. Manual assignment can be a slow and tedious process that is not well suited to an organization receiving many tasks and having many workers.
Some organizations automate the assignment of tasks. For example an organization can include a contact center, also referred to as a communication center or a calling center, having workers (e.g., agents) to whom tasks (e.g., telephone calls) are automatically assigned.
A contact center will be recognized to be a system to which a person outside the contact center can communicate to receive and/or transmit information. The person can communicate with the contact center in a variety of ways, including but not limited to, telephone calls, Internet access, E-mail, and facsimile.
Known contact centers can have many workers, referred to as agents, to whom a caller can be connected to in a telephone call. When the caller requests a communication with an agent, the contact center automatically selects an agent from among many agents. The selection is based on a variety of factors, including telephone call queue (wait list) and agent availability. A contact center agent can be viewed as a worker among many workers, to whom a requested task is assigned in the form of a telephone call from the caller.
A typical prior art contact center can include one or more interactive voice response systems (IVR). The IVRs provide automatic branching voice prompts to which the caller responds with button pushes on a telephone keypad or with voice responses on a telephone. The contact center can be provided having only the IVR systems, or alternatively, it can also provided having agents. For example, at the end of the IVR branching voice queries, the caller can be directed to press zero to speak to an agent. The agent is a person having a telephone to talk to the caller, hereafter referred to as an “agent telephone,” and a computer to access information about the caller, hereafter referred to as an “agent computer.” Note that though the agent telephone and the agent computer are often associated with one person, they can correspond to distinct electronic systems and may be separately referred to herein.
Conventional contact centers can include a variety of complex and expensive customer premise equipment (CPE). For example, such contact centers can include one or more public exchange/automatic call distributor PBX/ACD systems, one or more IVR systems, one or more computer telephony integration (CTI) systems, one or more agent telephones, one or more agent computers, one or more database server computers, one or more database storage areas, one or more web server computers, and one or more E-mail server computers, each of which are further explained in conjunction with FIG. 1. Having such a contact center may require that an organization purchase and maintain the CPE.
A contact center can have a variety of groups, each of which has specific agents assigned to a group. For example, a contact center can have a hardware support group, a software support group, a billing inquiry group, and an ordering processing group. Each one of the groups can have, for example, fifty assigned agents available to answer telephone calls, each of whom are trained to answer questions pertaining to the group to which they are assigned.
The number of agents assigned to a group can change from time to time, for example as agents begin and finish their work hours. However, the number of agents working in association with a group is relatively static. The relatively static nature of the number of assigned agents can, at times, cause excessively long telephone call queues and associated wait times. For example, if the number of telephone calls to a group exceeds the capacity of the number of agents working in association with the group to answer telephone calls, a caller may have to wait a long time before they are connected to an agent. When the telephone call queues and associated wait times become excessively long, additional agents can be added to the group. However, the addition of agents is a manual process requiring intervention by a contact center manager.
Conventionally, the agent telephones are coupled to the contact center by way of the PBX/ACD. As is known in the art, the PBX/ACD requires the agents to be physically present at the contact center in order to receive the telephone calls. Therefore, addition of agents when the telephone call queues and associated wait times become excessively long is difficult to achieve, since the addition of agents requires not only intervention by the contact center manager as described above, but also requires the additional agents to travel to the contact center.
In another conventional arrangement, agents are distributed among more than one contact center. This is often done because of the limitations of building size, but also because of the need to cover longer working hours. In order to allow agents to work no more than 8 hours a day, companies often have contact centers on the east and west coasts. With this arrangement, calls can be routed by the public telephone network preferentially to an Eastern contact center from 8 AM to 11 AM EST, then equally between Eastern and Western contact centers from 11 AM to 5 PM, then preferentially to the Western contact center from 5 PM to 8 PM EST, and then equally again during the night hours of 8 PM to 8 AM. With this particular arrangement, the public network is unaware of the queue lengths at the various contact centers and cannot balance the load since some calls may be longer than others resulting in random peaks and valleys in agent availability.
In the conventional system described above, there is no mechanism to rebalance the load among different contact centers. Therefore, in the natural course of call processing, different contact centers may have different queue lengths.
It would, therefore, be desirable to overcome the aforesaid and other disadvantages.